Blackest Spells

by Phipps, C. T.

  Salin gathered himself, straightened his robe, and asked, “What in the Hell have you done, boy?” His voice carried an indignant tone that belied his current position of cowering behind a summoning circle.

  “I’m done with your beatings, I’m finished with Guul torturing my ears, and playing his stupid piano, and I’m done being your Apprentice.” Jonathan spoke with more authority than he’d felt since being taken on in this miserable line of work.

  Salin looked over Kaelish again, and responded, “You’re a damned fool.”

  Jonathan knew his previous master was shaken and responded, “You only call me a fool because you are protected by your own summoning circle. You would not be so brave to call me names if you had to face me on even terms. This is my new pet, Kaelish. She is brilliant, beautiful, and powerful. When we are done here, we will be heading out of town to offer our services to Prince Torrek.

  “You are a bigger idiot than I ever imagined. Do you realize the danger you’re in?” While pointing at Kaelish, he went on, “That is an abomination. She is a Demon of Blight. How many times have I told you it’s in the intonation? I bet you tried to summon a demon a Light, or Fight, or maybe even Might. But you got Blight. Do you know what blight does?”

  “Yes, but she can keep it at bay if she eats sacrifices. So it’s a weapon that can be unleashed whenever she wants, against whoever she wants. The Prince will pay through the nose for her services.”

  “She is lying to you. I warned you about never summoning a demon without using my summoning circle. I can always banish, even the most powerful demon, if someone else uses my circle. You must use your master’s circle to summon your first pet. If it is too powerful, too dangerous to be unleashed, the master can send it back to Hell, and you can attempt to summon another. If you had waited long enough to learn the process, we could send her back and ask for something more controllable. Now that she’s here, you are tied for life.” Salin wrung his hands and paced back and forth inside the scribed shapes of his circle.

  “You’re lying to me. You always have. You saw that I had some talent to summon, cheated my parents out of an apprenticeship fee, and haven’t taught me anything but the pain of the lash, and the dread of bite marks on my ears! The Summoner’s Council should send you to Hell.” Jonathan had a full head of indignant steam as he raged on. “I’m done here. Cower in your circle old man. I’m beginning my journey that starts the rest of my life.”

  Kaelish had been quiet up until that point, leaning up against the doorframe. “Guul, come to me.”

  Guul’s eyes glazed over, and he shuffled outside the circle while Salin stared in horror.

  “You, you shouldn’t be able to do that. Guul, come back!” Jonathan had never heard that level of panic in Salin’s voice.

  Guul ignored his master, and skipped over to Kaelish, hopping on ungainly feet, and flapping his little wings. The little demon was somehow susceptible to the compulsion, even while inside his master’s protections. Kaelish reached down, picked him up by his neck, and bit off his entire ear. She threw him violently back into his master, hitting Salin the chest, and knocking him to his ass. Guul remained eerily quiet.

  She pointed at the duo while chewing the ear, and said, “If you follow us, I will eat you both.”

  Jonathan and Kaelish turned as one and walked out of the workshop.

  Kaelish swayed her hips as they walked north and said, “You did well in there. He did not deserve you. You will be the most powerful Summoner in the Kingdom. Maybe even the world.”

  Jonathan smiled back. “This is the best day of my life so far.”

  Jonathan woke with a start, blinded by his small fire. They had walked all day, putting as many miles between them and his old life as possible. He had fallen into an exhausted sleep as soon as they found the small cave, and Kaelish told him she was going to hunt a sacrifice. “Kaelish, is that you?” He gripped a rock like a weapon and strained his eyes against the blackness at the cave mouth.

  Salin stepped close enough to the mouth of the cave to be recognized. “No, she’s off feeding on a farmer’s livestock a couple of miles from here. It’s just me.”

  Jonathan was suspicious of the visit and asked, “What do you want? Why are you chasing me?”

  “You have your pet now, bonded for life. An extremely powerful and dangerous familiar. No one will ever threaten you again, for fear of her reprisal. Did I ever tell you the story of how I ended up with Guul?”

  Jonathan felt like he was finally being treated like an equal, and so invited Salin in. “Sit, tell me the story.”

  Salin twisted his robes out of the way, sat down beside Jonathan, and warmed his hands against the flames. The light danced against the ugly bruise forming around his eye. “My master banished a couple of familars before I ended up with Guul. You remember that I told you it was all in the intonation. At first I tried to summon a Demon of Lust and got one that rusted everything within a few hundred feet. That demon had to be banished, because we couldn’t keep any iron tools or braziers. Then I tried to summon a Demon of Rage and got another pet that just smelled like sage. My master explained that he would have made a fine pet, but that I was allergic to sage, and couldn’t keep him. See? The sage was easy enough to control, but I couldn’t concentrate with all the sneezing.”

  Jonathan nodded his head. “So the intonation comes out in our language as a word that rhymes, or sounds similar to what you’re trying to summon….”

  Salin nodded his head. “Exactly.”

  “So how did you get Guul? He just plays the piano.”

  Salin grinned, “I had a crush on a local girl and was trying to seduce her with my summoning prowess. Let’s just say I was not trying to summon a twelve-inch demonic pianist.”

  Jonathan’s eyes went wide with realization. “There’s a spell for that?”

  Salin used the distraction as an opening to shove a razor-sharp dagger in between Jonathan’s ribs, slicing a deep gash that punctured clear through the heart. He gently leaned Jonathan back to the floor of the cave as his life bled into the ground and whispered, “The only way to dispatch her, before she kills everything in this world, is to kill her master. And yes, my apprentice, yes. There is a spell for that.”

  Twinkle, Twinkle

  A Lucifer’s Star short story

  By C. T. Phipps

  “What the hell is that thing?” I asked, staring at the image on the viewscreen.

  The sight made me question if I wasn’t the victim of an elaborate prank. It was an enormous glowing energy spreading itself out in three parts, splashing around (for lack of a better term) in the solar plasma of the Hephaestus system’s sun. If that wasn’t crazy enough by itself, it seemed to be absorbing the energy from the stellar body at a rate that would collapse the yellow sun into a red giant within hours. Something that I suspected the inhabitants of Hephaestus III would be less than thrilled about.

  “It looks like an energy-based cosmozoan, sir. Sort of a big fire bat,” Jun, my sensor officer, said. She was a blue-haired woman of Shogun descent and far too talented for her job.

  “Or a phoenix,” her boyfriend, Eugene, said. He was the communications officer and a good-looking man of mixed Crius-Xerxes heritage. “Can we name it the Space Phoenix?”

  “That’s not a scientific classification,” Jun said.

  “And this is a pirate ship,” Eugene said.

  “Smuggling vessel,” Jun said. “We’re not robbing anyone today.”

  “I think the Albion University Department of Interstellar Life Studies would find that reason enough to deny us credit for finding it,” I said. “Assuming they believed us in the first place.”

  Jun looked despondent.

  “It looks like a big blob to me,” Clarice, my second-in-command and lover said what I was thinking. “One that’s eating the home star of our customers.”

  Clarice Rin-O’Harra was a hard-edged mercenary of Shogun descent like Jun but with bright red hair that was equally artificial
. She was taller than most men and fully capable of throwing them across the room when she was angry. I loved her but our relationship was complicated, not exclusive, and full of issues that made it as perilous as an untested warp jump. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  “Yes, that complicates things,” I muttered, sitting back in my command chair. “Looks like we won’t be getting paid this trip.”

  My name was Cassius Mass and I was the captain of the star galleon Melampus. It was a half-kilometer long ship with the population of a small town permanently living and serving onboard. As my crew said, it was both a smuggling vessel and occasional pirate ship. With the chaos in the Spiral, what humans called Orion’s Arm, we did our best to make a living along the Border Worlds between human-controlled space and the Community.

  Among the various jobs I arranged to keep the lights on and engines running was our yearly delivery of 100,000 tons of basic goods to Hephaestus III. It was a workhorse contract with little prestige or glamour but was dependable since no one else wanted to come out this far to deal with people who didn’t even have any ships of their own. For a ship that operated in the ass-end of space, the Hephaestus system was the furthest we went.

  “Has anyone actually ever seen a cosmozoan outside of a holodrama?” Eugene asked. “Especially one that, well, defies all the known laws of physics?”

  “No,” Jun admitted. “Though there’s always legends—”

  “There’s legends about ghost pirates and space gods,” Eugene interrupted. “That doesn’t mean they’re real.”

  “Some of those exist,” I pointed out, watching the scene on the screen with a perverse fascination.

  “Shouldn’t we try and do something?” Clarice asked.

  “Do what? It’s eating a sun. It’s not like our energy weapons will hurt it,” I said, throwing out my arms. We were a cargo ship, no matter how heavily armed, and way beyond the boundaries of what was normally encountered during a routine junk haul.

  “Sir, we’re getting a hailing frequency from Hephaestus III’s government,” Eugene said. “It’s the President of Hephaestus III.”

  “Mayor would be a more accurate summation,” I replied. “Put it on screen.”

  Hephaestus III was a colony of about five thousand residents, possibly a few hundred more since our last visit. The planet had once been inhabited by another sapient species before the Elder Races had wiped them out. It had a mostly nitrogen-based atmosphere and they’d set up enough atmosphere processors plus enough plant-life to be self-sustaining. They were modern-day pioneers and I sometimes wondered who they’d pissed off enough that fleeing to the end of the universe was a better choice than someplace more civilized. My world, at least, had been founded by a weird ass cult.

  The image that replaced the eating of a sun by a space monster, not something I ever expected to see in my life, was that of President Paula Lakshmi. She was a spectacularly lovely woman, the result of genetic enhancements, who’d made the somewhat bizarre decision to have her skin body-dyed purple as well as her hair made sparkling white. Paula wore a color-changing fabric that barely covered anything but it was more the fact the planet’s temperature reached regular highs of 96 degrees on a cool day. Standing beside her was her bodyguard/lover Korbin who was bare-chested, equally magenta, and looking severe.

  “How can I help you, Mayor…err Madame President,” I said, staring at her. “It seems you are witness to a horrifying miracle.”

  I’d already decided to dump the cargo for the trip and gather as many of the colonists up as possible. It would be a tight fit and we wouldn’t be able to save everyone. However, with the proper level of resource management, we’d be able to probably get a good four thousand to safety in the nearest starbase. I wouldn’t want to be one of the people who made the decision of who to leave behind but it wasn’t my first evacuation either: space was a pitiless mistress.

  “There is no time for poetic flourishes, Captain Mass,” Paula said, her voice hard and lacking any of the usual pleasantries we’d exchanged in the past few years. “We need you to kill the Fire Dragon.”

  “Is that what we’re calling it?” Eugene asked. “I was thinking sun-eating whale.”

  “Shut up, Eugene,” Clarice said.

  “Yes ma’am,” Eugene said, lowering his head.

  “With all due respect,” I said, using the code for ‘you’re out of your goddamn mind’ when talking to people higher ranked thank you, “that thing is eating your system’s star. I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to it. We can, however, get your people—”

  “It is the curse of the Technomancers,” Korbin said, staring forward with a haunted expression.

  “What?” Clarice and I said, simultaneously.

  “Jinx,” Eugene said.

  “Shut up, Eugene,” I said.

  Paula looked embarrassed. “The Technomancers are a sect of Chel religious extremists existing on the fringe of even the Border Planets’ space. They use a combination of Community and scavenged Elder Race technology to mimic…magic.”

  I processed that. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

  It was a phrase used a few times that no one knew the precise origin of. I’d encountered more than a few species that seemed to possess powers straight out of a fantasy holo.

  “Did you say Chel?” Clarice asked, narrowing her eyes as she clenched her fists.

  The Chel were a race of transhuman aliens. Their ancestors had gone above and beyond the normal genetic engineering humans did to work in space to make themselves barely resemble their parent race. They used advanced cybernetics to mimic telepathy and specialized pheromones as well as secretions to control emotions of people they touched. They were also, simply put, a bunch of assholes.

  Clarice had fallen into Chel hands once during her soldier days and almost lost her sanity. After weeks of torture, she’d made a general habit of suggesting executing every Chel we encountered. I wasn’t in the habit of summary judgements but so far, every Chel we’d encountered engaged in casual torture and mass murder of “lesser” humans.

  Like I said, assholes.

  Paula nodded. “Technomancer Master Akavma came to our planet and demanded that we turn over the relics we scavenged from the local Elder Race ruins. The Elder Race are—”

  “I know who they are,” I said, interrupting. I’d bought plenty of Elder Race relics from the locals. They were, in fact, the most profitable thing I acquired on these trips. Some of them I sold to museums and universities. Others, well, I sold to private collectors because they were buying food for these people and I was a pirate. Morals need not apply.

  “Akavma got very upset and cursed us,” Korbin said, pointing up to the sky. “He brought down the wrath of the Fire Dragon.”

  “Hold on a second,” I said, turning off the viewscreen. Much to Paula’s surprise as she realized what I was doing. “Okay, are we being had? Is there really a giant monster eating the sun, summoned by a freaking wizard?”

  “Space is weird,” Eugene said, shrugging. “Did you know I once met a guy with three—”

  “Eugene, remember my earlier order?” Clarice asked. “It now involves slapping the shit out of you ever time you open your mouth.”

  “Heads?” Eugene said, grimacing.

  Clarice raised her hand.

  Eugene cringed.

  “Is there any way this could be a weapon of the Chel?” I asked, looking around.

  “No,” Clarice said. “If the Chel had a weapon like this, they would have taken over the galaxy by now.”

  “Assuming they want to,” I said. “Elder Race artifacts can do almost anything, and they left them on worlds like this as refuse. Maybe the Fire Dragon is something this guy found while prospecting for their junk.”

  “Or something he knew was coming and is claiming credit for,” Clarice suggested.

  “Possibly. Send everything we have down to Doctor Hernandez and scan the system for signals arou
nd the sun,” I said, pointing to the screen.

  “That’s going to take a while sir,” Jun said. “Scanning is a long, painful, and annoying process.”

  “Hence why I have you do it instead of me,” I said, smiling.

  Jun muttered something suspiciously like my opinion about the Chel.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “We’re being hailed again,” Eugene said. “Assuming I can speak now.”

  “Put it on screen,” I said. “And don’t say anything unrelated to the mission.”

  Eugene grumbled.

  Paula glared at me. “We need your help.”

  “I’m trying,” I said, staring at her. “But it’d be best if you prepared to evacuate the colony. I can get most of you away.”

  Paula looked down. “We can’t. The colonists won’t do it.”

  “I think they’ll change their mind when the sun dies and they’re freezing to death,” I said.

  Paula paused. “Perhaps, but by that point, I won’t be President and the guns will have been drawn. This colony was founded on the principles of absolute freedom and the right to bear weapons.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, avoiding saying what I thought about that. “So, they’d rather die than leave a planet they’re squatting on.”

  “Yes,” Paula said. “So they say.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, staring. “We’ll try and fix this. If we can’t—”

  “Please save my people,” Paula said. “No matter what they’ve done to me for bringing this down on them.”

  “Try not to get too noble here,” I said. “All of the stuff I bring you comes from Colonial Settlement Company (CSC) inventory lost due to a programming error.”

  “Or pirates,” Clarice said.

  “Yeah, hate those guys,” I said before giving a fake smile. “Every pirate should be killed.”

  The rest of my crew returned my fake smile and looked at Paula.